Handheld units or portable devices such as cell phones, smart phones, iPads, Kindles, Blackberries, Navigation devices (Magellan or Garmin) and Android systems offer the ability to use location assistant devices such as maps. Maps online are provided by Google, Yahoo! Maps, MapQuest Maps and Bing Maps. When a user of the portable device uses maps, the map can be scrolled by using a button control or a touch screen. The touch screen buttons can adjust direction of map movement and can scale the image on the screen. For example, when using the touch screen two fingers sliding toward each other decreases the scale while sliding the two fingers sliding apart magnifies the scale. Both types of control offer the same results. In addition, some of these commands can be made by speaking where an on-board voice recognition unit can interpret the voice of the user and comply. When the destination is viewed and an item of interest may be outside of the range of the screen of the hand handheld unit, one must scale down (minimize) the screen to get a bearing of where this particular item of interest is with respect to the initial requested destination. However, at times, that scaled down map eliminates detail forcing the user to scale up (magnify) the map to reveal more detail of the map on the screen or display of the portable unit. These minimization and magnification processes may cause the user to lose bearing, particularly since the distance between locations is difficult to sense from scrolling the map across the screen of a portable device. This invention helps to overcome this shortcoming in current portable systems for providing map directions and offer several other advantages as well.